So this morning I find that I need to be cute and presentable in the southwest corner of New Hampshire in two short hours.
Despite being pretty well set with rail transport and armed with a nice bike I think it would take me a day to get there using Amtrak ... if I managed to make it at all.
The total distance from my hideout here in western Massachusetts to the Amtrak station in Springfield is just about ten miles. I’m in pretty good shape and I could peddle that distance in a little more than an hour ... but as I’ve noted before leaving this place on a bike is like crossing the Road America track at turn #11 – lots of big, fast vehicles going by here and I’d be stuck in a 24" wide ‘bike lane’ for miles and then I’d be facing an urban area. Oh, and we’re talking urban Springfield, where a well dressed white guy on a $400 bike might qualify as "prey" under the right circumstances.
I suppose I could try to catch the Vermonter at Amherst, which is a nice college town only a little bit further to the north, but then I’m peddling forever on 35 to 45 mph roads with cars and semis and no consideration for bikes.
I was presumptuous there – can I actually take my bike on the Vermonter? There are a complex set of policies which I’ve not explored yet. I’m going to actually take the bike and have a go at this one day soon, but not with money on the line ...
When I get there I’m exiting at Brattleboro, Vermont. This is a nice little college town, sort of like Amherst, only liberal :-) I’d face a pretty bike friendly small urban area, a hill climb into Hinsdale, New Hampshire, then several miles of 45 mph road with no bike consideration.
I’ve not inspected the Vermonter’s schedule well enough to understand it and I know there is the published schedule and reality, which can be two different things, but the Google shows me this and it looks like it would be about two hours of train time.
If I start in Springfield it’s $21 for the ticket. Amherst is only $15. Booking out into the future instead of today drops the rates to $18 and $12 respectively. I’m not clever enough to puzzle out how to get a day trip done with the Amtrak site – if I just put round trip, my start, and my destination it tells me I’m staying overnight.
Taking this at face values my choices are walking outside to get in a Nissan Versa that scores a little over thirty miles per gallon and burning four gallons of gas ($16) or spending $42 on a pair of train tickets, probably $100 minimum for a hotel room in Brattleboro, and taking roughly twenty eight hours to do what I can accomplish with the car in three.
There are two problems implicit in this diary and the first is where we live – I could find a place closer to a train station, but it’ll be Amherst, not Springfield, due to safety and culture concerns (I like used bookstores, not buy here/pay here auto lots). Doing this means I’m dependent on the Vermonter to get me to the Springfield hub which appears to be a means to adding an overnight stay in Springfield to many trips.
The second and larger implication is how we live. There is an expectation in business today that we will simply and directly transport ourselves at either sixty miles per hour by land or five hundred miles per hour by air to get to an appointment. There are exceptions to this in the northeast where train connections are rich but overall we expect travel to flex to fit our demands rather than fitting our travel to available services. The breaking of this particular cultural norm is going to be an immense psychic dislocation for our society. Give it a try yourself – if you’re one of the 99.44% of us who drive just take your car somewhere an hour’s walk away and leave it for a while ... you’ll get this funny, "stuck" feeling in pretty short order once you’re back home.